Ubuntu – Splitting a PDF page in two

My recommendation is Xournal and its actively developed fork, Xournal++. Here are the instructions.

Install (for Xournal):

sudo apt-get install xournal

For Xournal++ you can use either the stable PPA,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/xournalpp-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install xournalpp

or the flatpak,

flatpak install flathub com.github.xournalpp.xournalpp

Run xournal or xournal++, click File>Annotate PDF, choose your PDF file.

Now, go to where you need to add your signature and click Tools>Image (or the "Image" toolbar icon), then click where you want to add the image. An image selection dialog appears, select your image.

Xournal's insert image is a great addition but not polished. As soon as you add the image make sure to resize it and move it to where you want. For resize there's no ability to ensure the proportions stay the same. Just eye it. Once you are done, it is in its own layer, which you cannot change. If you don't like how it ends up delete that layer and start again.

One handy thing is that you can use ctrl-c as soon as you resize it and then ctrl-v the next time you need to insert your image. Assuming you want the same size image this will save you some time.

When you are done choose File->Export to PDF to get it back into the PDF format I assume you'll want for sending your signed doc.

Note: A downside to Xournal is the finished document looks like the fonts are converted to an image. Fonts are no longer as crisp. Still it looks better than if you printed and rescanned and is much faster. [Note: in my most recent experience it seems this problem has been solved. Maybe I just got lucky with the particular fonts used. Please leave a comment abt your experience and I'll update accordingly.] This issue seems to be fixed in Xournal++ version 1.0.20.

NOTE: This solution only works for Ubuntu versions up through 17.10. Ubuntu 18.04 and later do not have the pdftk package due to the packages being removed due to the dependencies to run the package being removed from the Archive for Bionic and later.

NOTE2: even if officially removed from 18.04, there is a snap version of pdftk; you can install it with snap install pdftk.

You can use pdftk. Install it with sudo apt-get install pdftk. Then, suppose you want to rotate the page 4 of your document test.pdf 90 degree clockwise:

pdftk test.pdf cat 1-3 4east 5-end output out.pdf 

You can do much more in pdftk, changing page order, rotation, merging various PDF files. The manual page is your friend here.

From man pdftk, referring to the cat operation:

<input PDF handle>[<begin page number>[-<end page num‐ ber>[<qualifier>]]][<page rotation>]

             Where the handle identifies one of the input PDF files, and
             the beginning and ending page numbers are one-based refer‐
             ences to pages in the PDF file.  The qualifier can be even or
             odd, and the page rotation can be north, south, east, west,
             left, right, or down.